The productivity of your sales team has a profound impact on your profitability and overall revenue growth.
When you improve sales productivity, you minimize the resources that are expended to maximize sales, which means that you spend less effort, time and money to drive increased revenues.
Empower your sales team to win more business and maximize productivity by using these five simple tips:
According to research by Aberdeen, it costs around $30,000 and takes more than seven months to bring a new sales rep up to speed. Most often, that's due to a lack of a formal training and onboarding process.
The first step to optimizing productivity is to put the proper tools and resources in place. That way, new sales reps coming in the door are armed with the in-depth knowledge that they need to effectively sell your products and services.
Of course, continual sales and prospecting training and development are also crucial, so make it a part of your company's culture as well. If poor sales leads management is an issue, you may need to revisit software solutions to find something that works better for your team as it evolves.
Like many organizations, yours may have completely separate sales and marketing teams. Both work significantly better and are much more productive when they collaborate, however, so consider merging the two to a certain extent. Establishing shared goals and metrics for sales and marketing helps one improve off of the other and vice-versa. With greater transparency and more communication, each side will be able to see how its actions affect the other, and a more productive synergy will develop.
Chances are that your sales reps spend significant amounts of time on unimportant, repetitive tasks. Whenever they engage in such activities, their focus shifts away from core selling activities to proprietary procedures that are not moving the needle for your business. Wherever you can, reduce or eliminate mind-numbing tasks like these.
Consider investing in tools and resources that enable your team to automate their most time-consuming, day-to-day tasks. While you're at it, work on automating the sales workflow. Have a clearly defined workflow in place for reps to follow, and optimize this process as the need arises.
Sales reps' productivity nosedives when they have to search high and low for content that suits their current pitch. Sometimes, they have to create it from scratch themselves. Avoid this issue by investing lots of time and effort into creating a truly state-of-the-art content library. Organize it in an intuitive way, and train your reps on how to make the most of it.
Tracking sales activity is easy. What about marketing activity? By tracking the results of your marketing efforts, you can boost the productivity of your sales team by ensuring they aren't continually barking up the wrong tree or neglecting actionable insight that gives them a foot in the door.
Collect information about metrics like sales cycle length, sales qualified leads vs. marketing qualified leads, win rates and conversion rates to more easily understand what works and what doesn't. You can also use data visualization to more easily understand how various efforts within the company impact sales.
Think beyond sales and marketing, factoring in product quality, customer retention and other company-wide metrics. Include your reps in the process so they can learn from it too.
All in all, investing in sales productivity now and putting the right tools in place, pays off in dividends for your entire company. Not only will you decrease the amount of time spent on prospecting, but you will also empower your sales team to win more business.